Recently I spent some time on Commons, and I came across two things that I
especially appreciated.
The first is a story on Yann's user page
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Yann>. While I think that
experience with participating on public Wikimedia projects is an important
qualification for many roles in the Wikimedia universe, this story reminds
the reader to place edit count into a wider perspective.
---
*A novice was once curious about the nature of the Edit Count. He
approached the Zen master and asked, "Zen master, what is the nature of the
Edit Count?""The Edit Count is as a road," replied the Zen master.
"You
must travel the road to reach your destination, and some may travel longer
roads than others. But do not judge the person at your door by the length
of the road he has travelled to reach you."*
*And the novice was Enlightened.*
*---*
The second thing that I especially liked on Commons is this photo
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flooded_Albizia_Saman_(rain_tree)_in_the_Mekong.jpg>
that was taken in Laos by Basile Morin. As you can guess, I generally like
trees.
On a different subject, Markus Kroetzsch wrote
<https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikidata/2018-October/012536.html>
to the Wikidata list that he is "happy to report that we" (Stanislav
Malyshev, Markus Krötzsch, Larry González, Julius Gonsior, and Adrian
Bielefeldt) "have just won the Best Paper Award of the In-Use track of this
year's International Semantic Web Conference (ISWC), for our description of
the SPARQL/RDF technology use on Wikidata. I keep telling people here that
the general awesomeness of Wikidata is the work of many, and in particular
of this great community of editors."
In older news, some time ago I was told about this video on Commons
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BareBonesSearch.webm> by Trey
Jones that provides an introduction to full-text search. I thought that
presentation was very interesting.
What's making you happy this week? You are welcome to write in any
language.
Pine
(
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )